One Way To Better Protect Your Website’s Files

I’m a member over at The Internet Marketing Inner Circle (TIMIC), which was created and is run by Willie Crawford. I help Willie moderate the forum and he’s become a good friend and mentor over the past couple of years.

Willie, Will Bontrager, and Patrick Pretty — all TIMIC members — got together to create and market a system that helps protect the files on your website, such as graphics and ebooks. The name of the system is Hot Link Alarm. I was able to purchase a copy before the public release (as a member of TIMIC) and played with it a bit. It’s going to help a lot of people who decide to become owners of this system.

I imagine that I could find some holes in it if I looked hard enough (and the instructions do mention some possible scenarios where this system would be ineffective), but all in all, it’s a pretty good package. It does what it says it’s going to do, and from what I could tell, it looks like it would take direct access to the web server account to seriously dilute its effectiveness.

The one thing I’d like to see is better instructions and perhaps some training videos (it’s also possible that I somehow missed them; the product team is pretty thorough in its approach, and if you really get stuck, help is available). Even without that, I was still able to set up and successfully test a site with the software.

If you go to a sample blog post that I set up for this test (at http://www.7simpletips.com/funny-error-message/, you’ll see that I have a graphic there. That particular graphic is protected using the Hot Link Alarm system. Note that it shows up just fine on this website. Also notice that if you do a “View Source”, you won’t find the graphic name. I did find one way to save the image to my computer, which I won’t disclose here.

Next, click on this link to see me try to steal that image, which is protected with Hot Link Alarm. You’ll notice the “Graphics Piracy Detected” image in spite of what I put in the source code (go ahead, take a look at it; you’ll see that I tried to directly hot link to the image on the 7 Simple Tips blog. Keep in mind that, with this system, your website visitors won’t see the direct link to the image in the source code). What you won’t see is the email that will hit my Inbox telling me that this Tom Brownsword guy is an image and bandwidth thief…

The system helps prevent theft of your intellectual property and bandwidth, and with the email alerts you receive (you have to set it up first), you’ll have enough information to contact the thief or their hosting company to complain about the theft.

There are many other alerting and “theft busting” options that I haven’t explored yet.

All in all, it’s a solid package and a solid system. It’s a low-cost control that can help reduce your risk of intellectual property and bandwidth theft.

You can learn more about Hot Link Alarm by clicking on this link.

Thanks for listening,
Tom

P.S. — If you have signed up for the blog announcement list, I apologize for the broken links. I just realized that I never uploaded the “thanks” and “confirm” files. I’ll take care of that shortly.